


Wine Red

by gakorogirl



Category: Justice League: Gods and Monsters (2015)
Genre: Implied Relationships, Multi, Sad Bi Vampire Kirk Langstrom, fear toxin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-30 00:31:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11452269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gakorogirl/pseuds/gakorogirl
Summary: Here is a young man all scars and battle-wounds, a snarling pacing thing with a taste for blood and salt and smoke.  There are teeth behind the soft curve of his smile and there is a flicker-bright sharpness behind the drooping lashes, something all coiled up tight in the ridges of his spine.After all, what good are niceties against monsters? There are things more dangerous than ghosts and dream-like wraiths; ghosts have no power in the sunlight.(A oneshot focused around Kirk, something of a character study.)





	Wine Red

 “Any progress?” asks Hernan, the doors to the computer bay sliding shut behind him.

 

“The records here are extensive. I’ve been working through the philosophy and literature, uploading it to the database.”

 

Kirk’s eyes are unblinking, redder than blood. He does not move, except for the flicker-soft dancing of his fingers in the air. Later there will be time to read each file in full, but for now he only glances, catalogues, files.

 

“Waller called. There’s a situation in-” Hernan glances down at the datapad in his hands, he never pays much attention to the specifics- “Gotham City. Not too far of a trip.”

 

“What’s the situation?” Knowing Gotham, it could be anything from bioweapons to gang warfare. Harley Quinn is dead, he knows, he remembers the arrhythmic jerk-gasp of her failing heart and the taste of something dark and rotting in her blood. Still, who can tell what still hides in the city’s alleyways? He took shelter there himself, not long after his transformation, and he knows Gotham is one of the best places on the East Coast for a wanted man to hide.

 

“Some kind of supervillain turf war is heating up, one of the main players is threatening to bomb the place at midnight. Calls himself _Scarecrow.”_

 

Kirk is interested now, and with a flutter of his fingers he dismisses the files hanging in the air around him. “Show me the debriefing,” he says, plucking the pad from Hernan’s hands and scrolling through the data with the tip of a finger.

* * *

 

He slinks through the air like a thing made of shadows, a smiling voiceless creature with hunger in the narrowing of his red, red eyes, in the gleam of teeth and the nervous flare of his nostrils. Pausing at the intersection of two passageways, he scans the air for any trace of toxin.

 

The communicator hidden in his cowl clicks on. “Superman,” he says quietly. “I haven’t found him.”

 

“I see him in there, but you’re still above him. Go down another level. I’d come down and lend a hand, but a gang war’s broken out on the streets and it’s a little _chaotic._ ” The line descends into static for a moment, and Kirk can faintly hear gunshots. Hernan swears softly and hangs up.

 

The tunnels have a downward slant, and as Kirk dives down another staircase, landing on feather-light feet at the bottom, he knows the return trip will be hard. There is a door ahead of him, a soft white light visible at the edges, and he opens his mouth slightly to breathe in the air, tasting it like a wary wild thing. Blood, faintly. Disinfectant, strongly. Something sweet- _nitrous oxide._ Mescaline. Maybe diphenhydramine. “Found him,” he says. “I’m going in.”

 

He throws open the door, whisking inside into a room of harsh fluorescent light and chipped linoleum, dodges behind a cabinet piled with gauze and disinfectant. It would look much like any operating room, except for the splashes of dark blood on the walls, the tang of fear and sweat and poison that no amount of disinfectant can cover. There is a masked figure on the other side of the room, tall, taller even than Hernan, stick-thin and all sharp edges. He must be Scarecrow.

 

Scarecrow turns, a gun in his hands, and his eyeless mask turns slowly, scanning the room. Kirk watches silently from behind the cabinet for a moment, waiting for the tall man to come within striking distance. The gun is not an ordinary gun, loaded with a large glass container brimful of thick green gas. Scarecrow’s footsteps echo, and his breathing is loud and harsh. Kirk can hear the ragged-edged beat of his heart. It’s nervous.

 

A nervous man is a dangerous man. Kirk stays still as stone and bone and Scarecrow passes him by, pushing open the door to look outside. Slowly, his shoulders relax, and he lowers the gun.

 

And Kirk _moves,_ striking fast and fierce and wrenching the gun away, throwing it across the room to clatter dully on the linoleum and grabbing Scarecrow and twisting his thin sharp arms behind his back and pinning him on his side. “You threatened to bomb the city.”

 

“To immerse it in fear toxin,” corrects Scarecrow, panting shallowly. His blind head turns side to side, avoiding Kirk’s flame-bright eyes and gleaming teeth.“The effects are totally-” Kirk cuts him off with a snarl, quiet and feral and dangerous.

 

“Where’s the bomb?”

 

“You wouldn’t be able to disarm it anyway. It’ll go off tonight, no stopping it.”

 

Scarecrow’s heartbeat is fast and jumpy and so very close to the surface of his skin, and Kirk bites down on his tongue to keep from tearing into the man’s throat. “If I were you, I’d be a little more cooperative,” he hisses, tightening his grip and curling his lips to show the expanse of his splinter-sharp ivory fangs. He doesn’t necessarily _enjoy_ playing on his more monstrous qualities, but it’s almost always effective. “Or didn’t you know what happened to Harley Quinn?”

 

“The third cabinet on the far end of the room has a keypad inside,” gasps Scarecrow, jerking in Kirk’s grip. “The code is 8-1-0-1. The bomb is inside, but there’s no way to disarm it. We’ll be safe in here, but your _friend_ upstairs- oh, there’s no telling what he’ll do once the fear sets in. It’s lucky he showed up, really- I never would have been able to level the city on my own.”

 

Kirk steps back, leaving Scarecrow panting on the floor as he walks over to the cabinet, picking up the gas-gun on his way. “Don’t try to go anywhere,” he says coldly. “I’m much faster than you.”

 

“I wouldn’t want to leave anyway,” replies Scarecrow, pushing himself into a sitting position and rearranging his eyeless mask, pulling it down over the bit of pale skin that was exposed when Kirk wrestled him to the ground. “The rest of the city will be flooded with the fear toxin shortly- this room is one of the few safe places.”

 

He checks the keypad for traps, a quick once-over in the time he has left, and punches in the code.

 

It’s a pleasant surprise that it actually works, sliding back to reveal a large metal bomb not unlike a nuclear warhead from seventy or eighty years back. Kirk sniffs at the air, the chemicals smelling sharp and sweet even inside the smooth metal container. He runs his fingers over the sides, steel as cold as ice. There’s no interface that he can see, just sleek metal, a small, closed port where he presumes the gas must have been pumped into the warhead.

 

“You can’t stop it,” Scarecrow says in a sing-song voice, and Kirk glances up the long, long shaft that the warhead will be launched up very soon- how soon? There’s no timer that he can see.

 

“How soon?” he asks.

 

“Midnight.”

Kirk checks the display of information that scrolls past on his goggles, his frown deepening. 11:58:02. If he can find how Scarecrow programmed the warhead, he stands a chance of disarming it. He remembers, suddenly, Bekka plunging her sword through a control panel (was that only a few months ago? It seems such a long time, but then again he’s never been the best at keeping track of the way time slips past-) and he smiles and says to himself, _“Low-tech.”_

 

There’s a hatch in the side of the shaft, and he rips it off, tossing it out into the lab. Thin pipes fill the space between the walls.

“What are you doing?” asks Scarecrow, his voice cracking as he jumps to his feet. Kirk pauses long enough to stick his head out of the shaft and bare his fangs, sending Scarecrow stumbling backwards, and then returns to tearing wires and bits of metal out of the hatch. He hopes he can do enough damage to stop the launch-

11:59:50

He won’t make it in time- the bomb is beeping softly, and he can smell the acrid fuel ready to kindle to life. With a snarl, Kirk grabs a thick twist of wires and pulls on it, something deep inside the wall creaking.

_This room is safe from the gas. Must be hermetically sealed. If the bomb goes off in here, the rest of the city should be safe._

There is a pneumatic hissing and a creaking deep below Kirk’s feet, and the shaft quakes, heating up. _Not enough, not enough._ He braces his feet against the side of the shaft and pushes against the warhead, and with a great metallic screech the warhead is torn from its brackets and falls onto the floor, with Kirk flopping over on top of it. If it goes off now- well, Hernan will be safe and so will everyone around him.

12:00:00

The warhead does not explode, but Kirk waits a few tense seconds before relaxing, slipping to the floor and landing in an animal’s crouch as he turns his head towards Scarecrow.

Scarecrow is holding the gun in his hands, and for the first time Kirk sees that a ragged jack-o-lantern smile is stitched onto the burlap mask. He narrows his eyes, bracing his fingers against the ground as he edges towards Scarecrow. “Put the gun down,” he says.

“I don’t think so,” replies Scarecrow, hiss-spit bitterness in his voice, and he fires, green smoke bursting out of the barrel in a narrow plume. Kirk covers his mouth, rolling out of the way as Scarecrow reaches for a rebreather and shoves it underneath his mask. The gas is starting to fill the room now, smelling sickly-sweet and sharp, and Kirk fumbles for his own rebreather as his eyes begin to sting.

He looks up, fitting the device to his mouth, and then his hands go slack.  (The rebreather, forgotten, clatters onto the chipped linoleum, and Kirk steps forwards without noticing it.)

“ _Tina_?”

She looks very much like she did in college, sunbeam-golden hair falling down around her waist, tiny green stones glittering in her ears. Her favorite pair of earrings. But she’s pale, she’s too pale, her lips nearly blue, and there is blood in her hair, dried dark and sticky and thick. When she tilts her head, her hair slides back, revealing ragged red fang-marks along the skin of her neck.

“No,” says Kirk, very softly, very weakly. “I didn’t-”

Blood oozes out of Tina’s neck, dripping red onto her cream sweater (favorite cream sweater, silken-soft and warm) and splattering across the linoleum as she walks towards him, and he steps backwards, running into the operating table. There’s a long, low hiss behind him that sounds all too much like his own, and he wheels, instinctively baring his teeth.

“You’re dead,” he spits at Will, just as pale as Tina, sitting on the table with his legs swinging, so very casual.“You _died_ , I saw you.” He’s hallucinating, he has to be. A hallucinogenic gas- or something? His memories are a little fuzzy, and right now he only sees Tina in the corner of his vision, red red blood staining her hands and her sweater, and Will in front of him with a grotesquely sharp smile.

“Maybe,” says Will. “But let’s pretend for a minute that you just made that up, a sort of self-delusion, to hide the fact that you really _snapped_ one day and _killed-”_

“You killed her,” screams Kirk, raggedly. _“You did!”_

Will smiles a Cheshire grin and hops down from the table, walking towards Kirk. There is something unnatural in his walk, and Kirk flinches back, baring his teeth. “Get away from me,” he snarls as Will’s fingertips brush against his cheek. “You _filth-”_

And he blinks and suddenly Will is a skeleton man, skin sloughing black from his blood-heavy bones. “Why, Kirk?” he asks, his bruise-dark and swollen fingers still warm against the arch of Kirk’s cheekbone. “I thought you _loved_ us.”

Kirk shudders and steps back, and feels a hand on his wrist. Stiffening, he turns his head and looks into Tina’s eyes, sunken and framed with bruise-dark shadows. She looks at him. He looks at her, shaking like a leaf in the wind. Delicately, he reaches out, his pale fingers brushing a blood-matted strand of golden hair from her face. “Tina,” he breathes, old sorrow breaching his spider-silk voice.

She turns away from him, and he sees again the deep marks in the petal-soft skin where her neck meets her shoulders. “You couldn’t help it, could you?” she asks. “Any of it.”

“Just like an _animal,”_ spits Will, and suddenly there are more dead faces gazing at Kirk- Bekka, red hair, red-stained teeth, wounds as red as pomegranate juice spilling over her shoulders and her throat. Hernan, his hair heavy with dust and his eyes as empty as a blind man’s gaze-

“You’re not _real,”_ Kirk screams, his voice feeling like barbed wire in the fragile inside of his mouth. He hisses, turns away to run anywhere, _anywhere-_

 _Kirk,_ says a voice from nowhere, and there are warm arms around him. Kirk shudders, his eyelids flickering as he tilts his head to look for the source of the voice. The ring of dead faces watches him, but now- if he tilts his head, he can see through Tina’s slender arms, and the blood-slicked hair falling over her shoulders is misty, somehow.

Will trembles as his hands fade from view, but he smiles a sharp smile stained with heartblood. The air reeks of thunder and sings with a locust humming.

_I’m real, Kirk._

“Where are you?”

There are warm arms around him, not cold and dead but thrumming with living blood. He can’t see them yet, but he opens his mouth to taste the smokey air. _Hernan._ “Alive?” Kirk manages, starting to tremble so strongly he fears he might dash himself apart. The raw rush of fear is draining from his system, and as he blinks the wavering, distorted outline of Hernan appears in his vision.

(One moment Hernan smiles with a fanged mouth, face and neck stained red as a martyr’s corpse- and the next he looks concerned, frustrated, his face furrowed. Kirk has a good guess which of the two overlaid faces is real, and he forces his tight-wound body to go slack.)

_Can you hear me? Can you see me?_

“Can’t...see too well. You- hurt?”

“I don’t get hurt, Kirk. I’m Superman,” Hernan replies, and his voice comes sharply into focus at the same moment that his worried frown grows clear in Kirk’s vision. There’s a hole punched into the hermetic chamber, leading ten stories up to the city lights of Gotham.

“I heard you screaming, and I needed to get down,” says Hernan with a shrug. He loosens his grip and lets Kirk struggle upright. “When I came down Scarecrow was gone, you were staggering around and shouting. You fell.”

“Fear gas,” Kirk murmurs. He shakes his head, lost in his private garnet-dark sorrows. His legs are as shaky as a new colt’s, and he rests one hand on Hernan’s arm below the shoulder. “Thank you,” he adds after a few seconds of silence.

“You couldn’t hurt me, Kirk. Nothing you could do would even break my skin.” A note of arrogance sounds in the words, but this is the best way to comfort that Hernan knows how. And Kirk nods, a thin pale smile playing on his lips. It is enough.

* * *

On the nights when the nightmares grow too heavy, they speak to Bekka a thousand worlds away. Luthor is still creating a device that will carry video through the space between universes, but they can hear her voice like new-rising smoke and the starsong in her mouth, their Wonder Woman with a solar-flare heart. “I saw Will and Tina,” Kirk says that night, his eyes on the burning twilight sky over the city. “I killed them.”

“We know the truth, and so do you,” Bekka tells him, soft static edging her voice. “That’s what’s really important.”

“And we’ll always be here,” Hernan adds, his heavy hand resting on the knife-blade edges of Kirk’s shoulder blades. “Remember- you couldn’t hurt us even if you wanted to.” And Kirk relaxes, his wound-red eyes closing. He places his palm against the cool glass windows, feeling the beat of his own heart loudly in his ears. 

“Always,” he says, and you could almost forget about the glass-shard teeth hidden behind the contented softness of his smile.


End file.
